12 A Grid Enabled Framework for Ubiquitous Healthcare Service

The trend in modern healthcare is towards making quality services ubiquitous so as to improve accessibility and to reduce costs of services. The aspiration of government around the world is to improve the wellbeing of citizens and to deliver quality services that can add value to the people. Healthcare is one of those important services that can significantly improve the wellbeing of citizens and add value to people’s quality of life because metaphorically, health is wealth. Moreover, healthcare represents a huge portion of Gross Domestic Products (GDP) and it sustains a strong public interest across the world. But, the conventional healthcare system is generally being confronted with the problems of low quality of services, lack of easy accessibility to service varieties and high costs of services. The advancement in healthcare technology and the constantly changing nature of healthcare environment have brought about high costs of treatments. Many hospitals across the world cannot afford to pay for high costs of sophisticated healthcare equipment to provide costeffective services. Those few special hospitals that are able to afford the costs of expensive healthcare equipment are charging patients high service fees to breakeven. These healthcare equipment are available in specialized hospitals having highly skilled experts to utilize them successfully. This implies that people who are living in rural areas need to travel long distances to access quality healthcare services at expensive costs. Moreover, disabled people and nomadic individuals living in rural seclusion find it difficult and expensive traveling long distances to access quality healthcare services. These challenges are particularly conspicuous in developing countries and rural world, making the realization of the health related Millennium Development Goals (MDG) a mirage. The general challenges facing the rural world are intermittent power, intermittent connectivity, long travel distances, variable population density, limited education, underemployment, limited disposable income and lack of secure storage (Parikh & Lazowska, 2006). Even in the developed world where there are claims of highly skilled expertise and accessibility to sophisticated healthcare resources, there is still the problem of aging population in this part of the world. The aging population quandary has led to more disabilities and is continually pulling renowned experts out of active services. This has serious ramifications on the social expenses incurred on healthcare. There is also evidence that low quality of service provisioning caused by variation and dichotomy in healthcare